The Nominee

Nineteen

THE TWO OF US, myself and Hank Sweeney, strode through the front gates of the Boston Public Garden and past the statue of George Washington on horseback as the night air turned cool and the glow of the lanterns cast eerie shadows around the bushes and tulip beds that lined the concrete paths. The two plainclothes bodyguards stood watch out of earshot, though hopefully not gunshot, while we took a seat on the exact bench where Paul and I had sat just three days before.

Three days. Seemed more like three weeks. Hell, three months, or even three years.

By the way, it will become relevant to note that I had given my former girlfriend my car to take home for the night, or take wherever.

“How will I get it back to you?” she asked as she sat in the driver’s seat and I stood at the door in the parking lot of Louis. The words were innocent, the tone wasn’t, not when you knew her, which I used to better than anyone else on Earth. I didn’t know if that still held true.

“You’ll find a way,” I replied.

As she started the ignition, I heard her say in a low voice, “Maybe I better just take it to your place now.”

Before I could reply, she was off.

“So you held out on me.” I said this to Sweeney as I looked him square in the eyes, though I said it with amusement rather than anger or annoyance. Of course he had held out on me. I knew he would before I went down to Florida. I knew it when I was with him. I knew it now. He’s a cop, I’m a reporter, and that’s just what cops do to reporters. It’s one of those unimpeachable facts of life, like dogs licking their privates. They can, thus they do.

He ignored me, which is another one of those things that cops do to reporters. He looked around the dimly lit park, at the black beneath the trees, at the shadows from the lights, and said, “I used to take my lunch breaks down here when I was just starting out over in District 3, and Mother would come over and meet me from her office. All the high-priced lawyers were out here and the pols from the State House and the rich people from Back Bay and students would lie on the grass and read, and we used to walk around the pond, me in my uniform and her all gussied up from work. Sometimes we wouldn’t even say anything, we’d just walk, and it was the best part of my day. We saw Katherine Hepburn in here once.”

He paused before adding, “We didn’t have any kids then.”

My mind and intent were obviously elsewhere, so I asked halfheartedly, “Did your wife make the trip with you today?”

“Nah,” he answered, softly, but in a tone that said it was a dumb question. “No, she doesn’t travel well these days. The years haven’t been as good to her as they’ve been to me, so she mostly stays put. She likes it down there.”

“But you don’t.”

He turned toward me.

“Son, at my age, it doesn’t really matter what I like or don’t like anymore. I’m just happy to be above ground rather than in it.”

He looked straight ahead again, his elbows resting on his knees. I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating, Hank Sweeney was a large man — not large as in monstrous or freakish, but just big all over, with big hands that led to wide forearms and broad shoulders that framed a barrel chest. You could tell he was handsome in his younger years when he walked around the park in his patrolman’s uniform with his pretty wife clutching his arm. He had probably been a football standout at some local high school.

I nodded. “I’m starting to know what you mean.”

There was a long silence between us. He knew I wasn’t interested in talking about his family or his history, and I knew that’s not what he had flown a thousand miles to Boston to discuss. Finally, he said, “Yes, I held out on you, but it might just be meaningless. I didn’t want to get you all in a knot.”

I said nothing. As a reporter, you never get in the way of someone about to tell an important or interesting or just plain old good story. This, I suspected, would be all of that, so I leaned in and looked at him expectantly.

Sweeney looked back at me and said, “You remember I told you how I played your old publisher’s case exactly by the book.”

I nodded.

“Diagrammed everything, numbered everything. Ordered tests. Christ, you could have taught a class on sudden death procedures just on my reports, they were so perfect.

“But down in Marshton, you asked if anything at the crime scene raised my suspicions, or bothered me, I think you said. I didn’t answer you, but yeah, something did. It might be nothing. It’s probably nothing, but when you tell me there’s no lab report on it, that really burns my ass hairs.”

I twitched on the bench. As he talked, his face started to glow, like a little boy who just sprinted toward home plate. I’m not sure if it was from embarrassment or from his self-professed anger. I stayed silent, just watching. He continued.

“There was a tissue on the bathroom floor.” He paused for effect.

“It was sitting behind the toilet, as if someone had meant to throw it in and flush it away, but missed.” Another pause. He was very comfortable talking business and procedures and seemed to revel in storytelling. In his line of work, he had a lot of them, and it’s probably good to get them out, to share the emotions of staring at so much death rather than keep it all inside, as I’m sure too many detectives do too much of the time.

“It caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Most important, the rest of the bathroom floor was so clean you could have eaten a lobster dinner off it.

“I asked a few questions and learned that the maid had cleaned the bathroom late the previous afternoon, so the tissue was definitely new.”

I interrupted, asking, “But couldn’t he have just missed the toilet himself?”

His expression didn’t change. “Of course he could have. He might have just blown his nose and flicked it in the toilet as he turned away and never even known he missed.” Yet another pause.

“But I did a quick comparison. The tissue on the floor was baby blue. It was a Kleenex, I believe, something that comes out of one of those boxes. There was a box of tissues in the bathroom, about half empty, but the tissues were white, not blue.” He looked at me hard, seeing if I was following. I was, but wasn’t yet as excited as him.

“The toilet tissue was white, not blue. There was a box of tissues in each of the other two bathrooms in the condominium, but they were all white, not blue. So the tissue on the floor came into the apartment from the outside. Someone brought it in.”

It all seemed very weak to me, so I asked, “Couldn’t John Cutter have brought it in himself? Maybe that’s the kind of tissue he had at work, or he kept a sleeve in his car, or he stopped and grabbed one at a restaurant that night.”

“Of course. All good questions. And the tissue was the same kind they had in the public men’s room off the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel downstairs.”

As he said this, I glanced to my right and, through the still-bare trees, saw the lights of the Four Seasons hotel glitter in the near distance. It was a beautiful hotel that suddenly took on the aura of a death trap.

“I asked employees in the hotel restaurant if Mr. Cutter had been in the previous evening for dinner or drinks, and he hadn’t.”

I said, “But couldn’t he have grabbed the tissue at some earlier point? I mean, surely that tissue could have been in his suit or pants pocket for a while, no?”

“Again, of course. But I’m still left with the same question I began with.” He paused for a longer break than usual. “I ordered tests to be performed on that tissue, to see what, if anything, was in it or on it. They were fairly routine tests, just to cancel it out for any evidentiary value. But according to your review of the report, that test wasn’t done. Why the hell not?”

He looked at me, his dark skin blending into the blackness behind him, and I looked back at him, not sure what to say. I couldn’t really feel the cool anymore, though all this talk of tissues was making my nose itchy. I’ll point out, probably because my olfactory senses were on high alert, that the park smelled of freshly turned earth.

I mulled his assertions, his concerns, for a minute as we continued to meet each other’s gaze. I finally said, “So tell me what you expected to find?”

“What did I expect to find? Nothing, really. Probably just as you said, Mr. Cutter picked the tissue up somewhere else, meant to toss it in the toilet, and missed. That simple. But like I said, show me a dog and I’m assuming it’s a cagey wolf waiting for the right moment to disembowel you.”

He looked out at the duck pond and the light from the lanterns that danced across the skin of the black, glassy water. Then he set his gaze back on me, somewhat amused now. “You asked me what I expected to find. But you didn’t ask me what I feared I’d find.”

He was into the theatrics of it, so I played along. I raised my eyebrows and said, “Yes?”

“I don’t want to raise any red flags, but whoever the hell didn’t do the tests I requested has already done that for me. What I feared I’d find was some sign of poisoning.”

He paused, arching his back to stretch. Then he added, “Specifically, when someone ingests arsenic, there’s typically a foaming in the nasal passages that manifests itself in the victim’s nose, and occasionally, in their mouth. I didn’t find any visible sign of that foam in or on or near Mr. Cutter, but I just wanted to make sure that a killer didn’t clean him off and mistakenly leave the evidence on the bathroom floor.”

I sat there stunned and silent and confused and appreciative. A homeless man came walking toward us and the two bodyguards blocked his way and steered him in the opposite direction. I looked up and saw a nearly full moon perched atop the buildings of the downtown skyline.

Arsenic. The lead police detective on the case had been secretly concerned that someone intentionally poisoned the publisher ofThe Boston Record, so he ordered some toxicology tests. And those tests were never done, or at least recorded, and the apparent evidence is nowhere to be found.

As Sweeney might ask, when is a dog not a dog? When it’s a wolf.

“What’s your gut tell you?” I asked.

“Well, on one level, it tells me I wish I had eaten dinner with you at that Louis place, because I’m starved.”

I didn’t laugh, so he added, “On quite another, it’s unsettled. There could be an easy explanation for all this. Someone might have been lazy and just didn’t bother with the requested reports. Maybe they did the reports and the sheet fell out of the folder. I don’t know.”

“Or?”

He looked at me square in the face, his features pitched back and his eyes stern, and said, “I really don’t know, son, but now aRecord publisher has been murdered, and I’d like to find out damned quick whether his predecessor was killed as well.”

I leaned back on the bench, a little more relaxed now that I sensed most of the news of the moment was already out. “I appreciate that very much,” I said, “but I have to ask you, why? Why are you doing this? You don’t know me from a hole in the wall.”

“Son, don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s not really about you. Somebody might have disobeyed one of my orders, and I don’t like that, especially since it was the last one I ever gave as a Boston cop. Somebody might have been disrespectful toward the dead, and I like that even less.”

He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled toward the sky.

“Don’t think I’m strange,” he said. “But you’re a homicide detective, you have a kinship with the dead. They’re your clients, and sometimes, they become your friends in some odd, imaginary kind of way. You see them shot up or carved up or unspeakably mangled, and you have to imagine what they were like in life, so you talk to others, you pry into their pasts, you put a personality with the cold flesh that’s lying in a refrigerated roll-out locker at the medical examiner’s office. And you have to look around the room where they died or on the street or in their car, and imagine what those last moments must have been like, the terror, the pain, the sorrow, and the regret. They’re gone, and in many respects, you’re their only representative left in life, and it’s your job, your one and only job, to achieve justice.”

He paused again, staring out across the pond at the empty expanse of blackness.

“That’s why I’m here.”

I thought of Paul being wheeled down the long aisle of Trinity Church, his casket on the bricks of Copley Square outside, the gun-metal black hearse glinting in the noontime sun, the bagpiper playing “Amazing Grace” as he was slowly lowered into the open earth.

Then I thought of John Cutter drawing his last breaths in his bed at the condominium overlooking this very park that he loved so much. Was he awake when he died? Had someone poisoned him? Did he have a heart attack and pass gently in his sleep?

I turned toward Sweeney, who continued to look straight ahead, and said, “Well, I’m sure John Cutter appreciates it very much, and I know I do. I wish you were on Paul Ellis’s murder as well.”

He asked, “Any more sightings of the guy in the swamp?”

I shook my head again. He said, “Well, you smell better this time, anyway.” Then he laughed.

His laugh was infectious, so I started laughing too, almost despite myself. It’s as if, sitting here with a retired detective, being watched by two guards, a pressure valve had been released. I couldn’t stop laughing.

I said, “Talk about mucking things up.”

“Swamp Man.”

We both laughed again — more of a giggle, actually.

When we stopped, he looked at me and asked, “Do you know Robert Fitzgerald?”

I said, “Of course I do. He’s one of the best in our business, and a great guy to boot.”

He didn’t reply, so I asked, “Why?”

“Oh, he’s famous. Just wondering what he’s like. I used to read him all the time when I was in Boston, and I used to see him around crime scenes now and again. I think he used to be tight with the commish.”

“He’s tight with a lot of people,” I said. “It’s amazing how many officials he has feeding him information.”

Sweeney looked down at the grass in front of us, then at me again, and asked, “So why do you have an ex-girlfriend that beautiful and friendly.” He stressed the prefixex in a demanding kind of way.

“Life’s complicated.”

I wanted to leave it at that, but he didn’t earn his stripes as a homicide detective for being passive.

“Exactly, which is why you don’t want ex-girlfriends. You want current ones, good ones, beautiful ones, and then you want to make her into your wife.”

“If only it were that easy.”

“Well, you’re right, it isn’t.” His voice was lower now, fatherly, confiding. “But good things usually aren’t, are they? Me, I’ve been married so long I can’t even remember what it’s like not to be married to her, and I’d never have it any other way.”

“You’re lucky,” I said. “Maybe it’s generational. My parents had such a great marriage that my mother died of a broken heart right after my father’s death. These days, it just doesn’t seem as easy, you know? I don’t know. I don’t know what it takes. I did have a good marriage, but then my wife died, and I don’t know what it’s going to take for me to get over that.”

“Time,” he said somberly, staring straight ahead. “It takes time.”

The mood had become far too heavy, so I asked, “Where are you staying tonight?”

“Oh, I’ll find a place. You’re me, all you need is a place to lay down between trips to the bathroom.”

I had this awful image of him ambling past the Four Seasons Hotel, where John Cutter lived and died, a solitary silhouette in a dark night, heading for one of the cheap flophouses on the outskirts of the theater district. So I said, “It’s not much, but why don’t you come crash in my spare bedroom, provided you don’t mind sleeping on a boat.”

He looked at me amused. “A boat? What do you have, one of those yachts with a foreign-speaking captain who takes you down to the Caribbean every winter?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well this is awfully nice of you. Can we get a bite to eat on the way?” And just like that, I had a roommate, and I’d find out very soon, something far more.